We next went to the old city of Arequipa, which is a very different city compared to the rest of Peru. It is called the Ciudad Blanca (white city) because all of the white buildings made of a volcanic ash. They have even tried to gain their indepence from the country and have gone so far as to make their own passports. It is a beautiful city and seemed much more calm than Cusco or Lima. It is surrounded by beautiful volcanoes, the most obvious of which is Misti, shown here.
We took a Colca Canyon tour, but did not get to see the deepaest part of this canyon. The deepest part is over 3000 m in depth and it is the 2nd deepest canyon in the world. The first is actually pretty close to here, but is not as often visited. We actualy had a very bad tour and were not very happy wtih most. The transportation was very tight and uncomfortable, the hotel was not at all nice, our bus broke down on the 2nd day and we were not able to see all of our stops. Nonetheless, we did see some cool things. I would recommend going with Giardino tours if you are going to do this. It is more expensive, but we have only hear great things about that tour company. We rode in the bus for most of the day, but stopped at points to see lookouts. One point where we stopped was the highest elevation we have ever been, at 16,170 feet or 4,910 meters. I definitely felt a little dizzy and winded up there, but there were beautiful views of volcanoes all around. There were also the little rock statues that we had seen on the pass during our Lares Trek. Again, these are in reverence to the gods of the mountains. There was a little shopping from local vendors up there and Scott got the cutest picture of a little girl and a lamb.
That night, we went to a restaurant that had typical Peruvian music and dancing from this region. The dancing wasn't overly impressive, but the acting that they did during the dancing was very entertaining. This is all I got a video of though - enjoy!
The next day, we stopped in another small town where they had more dancers on the street performing. You can see the men are dressed very similary to the women. This is so they could spend time with the women, but in hiding. They were not allowed to talk to the women on the streets, so had to dress up. The men also have straps over their face to add to the hiding. There were also women with all sorts of animals that we could hold or get our pictures with. You can see Scott and and I with a hawk here.
The canyon itself was definitely the coolest thing. Unfortunately, you could not get a good picture to show the depth of what we saw. We only saw it at a bit over 1000 meters deep, but it gets much deeper in other parts. Although it is deeper than the Grand Canyon, I did not find it as impressive because it was not nearly as wide. Just my opinion, though. It was quite beautiful. The most exciting thing that we saw were condors flying around the canyon. We took tons of pictures, but they really cannot start to describe the beauty of these birds. Or the size! They can be up to 3 meters wide with their wingspan! I did not realize how large they really were until one flew right over a crowd of people. It was so much bigger than the people - amazing! They were really a site to see.
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